Commentary: Flyers running out of time after blowing lead

PHILADELPHIA — For whatever was gained by the recent NHL lockout, and for whatever might have been salvaged, there was destined to be one vital sports value lost. For one labor-truncated season, at least, there would be no forgiveness.

In a season already half over, the Flyers have come to realize that. And in an entertaining and oh-so-meaningful match Thursday against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Wells Fargo Center, they looked at it straight on.

They could not waste that one, not with the way it began, not with the potential it carried, not with the weight it could plop on their shoulder pads for the rest of the season.

It was their time.And then...it was their worst loss of the season.

“Yeah,” captain Claude Giroux said.

After building a three-goal lead, the Flyers lost, 5-4, were booed while on the ice, then had their killer instinct questioned afterward in the dressing room. Nor were they in any mood — or position — to mount a counter-debate.

“We had the game in our hands,” Giroux said. “And in the second period, we came out flat. And it cost us another two points.”

Peter Laviolette tried his two favorite tricks during a second-period retreat. That would be the timeout and the goalie change. In 2010, he came to own the moves during an unlikely advance through Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals, not that it would help the Flyers in the deciding Game 6. That sport doesn’t work that way, not like baseball does with a pitching change, not like basketball does with the stop-the-madness T.O. But the fragile, troubled Flyers needed something, and that’s about all Laviolette had left. So he replaced Ilya Bryzgalov with Brian Boucher, who has been just good enough since 2002 to threaten the job security of a long line of coaches.

Boucher was useful, at least, even if he did allow the game-winning goal. But the Flyers needed him to be more than that; they needed all of their players to be more than that. They’ve needed more since beginning the season at 0-3 and never fully recovering.

“You can’t give up leads like that, if you want to keep making your way up the standings,” Boucher said. “So obviously, nobody is very happy about it. It is very frustrating right now.”

Had the Flyers won Thursday, they would have been within five points of the first-place Pens, and would have won two of the five regular-season games in the series. That would have rented them a chance to breathe Saturday in Boston. Even if they would have lost to the Bruins — and that is the likelihood — they could have rebounded Sunday night at home against sputtering Buffalo. That would have made for a satisfying weekend.

Instead, they will head to Boston in what must be a panic, with half a goaltending controversy and a two-game losing streak.

“In tonight’s case, you see this stuff happen all the time,” Boucher said. “A team gets up, 4-1, but the team on the other side is a very good hockey team. If you take your foot off the gas just a little bit, things change in a hurry.”

The Flyers have won seven of their 12 home games, troubling but somewhere south of catastrophic. Jake Voracek continued a longshot MVP candidacy Thursday with two more goals. There is a thread of appeal in a roster that includes some improving, young stars.

Yet the Flyers are booed more often at home than they have been in years, if ever. The maddening, generations-thick wait for another Stanley Cup is a reason. There could be some residual grumpiness from the lockout. There is the growing realization that, at best, the Flyers are flattening under Laviolette — if not retreating. But the most likely source of the impatience is the Flyers’ lack of consistency, which could stream from their lack of a mobile defense, or from a lack of sturdy leadership, or from the simple oddity of the speed-up season.